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Why Two Pounds Of Dirt From Mars Costs $9 Billion | So Expensive | Insider - YouTube
Channel: Business Insider
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this red dirt will be the most expensive
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substance known to mankind
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if we can bring it back from mars
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it will take three missions to collect
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and retrieve less than one kilogram
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or a little over two pounds
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one mission will examine and collect
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samples it launched from earth in july
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2020
[23]
a second mission will gather the sample
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tubes and launch them into mars orbit
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a third mission will bring the samples
[31]
back to earth
[32]
and the total cost will top nine billion
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dollars
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so what makes samples of the dirt on
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mars so important that nasa needs to
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bring them back
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will they help us finally answer the
[46]
question of whether or not we are alone
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in the universe
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heat shield set current speed is about
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30 meters per second
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altitude of about 300 meters off the
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surface
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of mars the perseverance rover landed on
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mars on february 18th
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2021 confirmed perseverance
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safely on the surface of mars
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ready to begin seeking the sound of past
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life
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[Music]
[76]
percy as the rover is nicknamed arrived
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after years of meticulous planning and a
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seven month voyage through 300 million
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miles of space
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it's a feat considering only 40 percent
[89]
of missions to mars have been successful
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and because it's all autonomous it has
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to work the first time
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or for baseball fans out there space is
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a one strike and you're out business
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percy will spend two years carrying out
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experiments and collecting samples of
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martian rock
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the mission costs nasa 2.7 billion
[109]
dollars
[111]
the rover is a mobile laboratory looking
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for signs of life and answers to some of
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mankind's
[117]
biggest questions if there was life on
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mars exactly what was it a billion years
[121]
ago was it four billion years ago did it
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predate or post-date life on earth
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you might want to know that because you
[126]
might want to know for example where
[128]
life originated first
[129]
and maybe it's even possible some people
[131]
suggested that life could have gone from
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one planet to another
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the rover is painstakingly searching for
[138]
and identifying rocks
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in jezreel crater the site of an ancient
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martian lake bed
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even from space we can see that there
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was a lake in this crater
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that lake has not been present for
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billions of years and so we need to
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reconstruct this history and to tell a
[153]
history of the place
[156]
nasa picked this lake bed because it
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offers the best chance of finding
[160]
evidence of life
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it will be one of the greatest
[163]
discoveries in human
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thought i mean forget just science
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perseverance is the size of a small car
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built
[172]
to analyze the martian surface with
[173]
cameras radar x-rays and spectrometers
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then collect samples with drills and
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even lasers
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but despite the cutting-edge technology
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the instruments are nothing compared to
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the much larger and more capable
[188]
instruments and labs found on earth
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and to see microbes and fossils in rocks
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one
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needs to cut rocks to look through them
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make
[197]
thin slices and then use those
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microscopes and none of that is possible
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with the current rover technology a lot
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of the work before launch
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focused on guaranteeing that evidence of
[207]
life gathered by percy
[209]
is in fact martian life when we're
[212]
sending spacecraft to mars we have to
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make sure that it's clean enough
[216]
so that we don't contaminate the
[217]
environment that we are trying to
[219]
explore
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at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in
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southern california
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engineers and scientists cleaned and
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tested the spacecraft to levels
[227]
far beyond the most sterile operating
[229]
room we've taken over 16
[231]
000 samples of the spacecraft we clean
[235]
we trust but we always verify so and
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we're also extra paranoid about making
[239]
sure it's clean so that's why it turned
[240]
into 16
[241]
000 over 16 000 samples when neil
[244]
armstrong returned with moon rocks
[246]
they were stored in triple sealed
[248]
aluminum boxes
[249]
designed to protect their contents for
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about 10 days
[254]
for this mission to mars engineers
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designed a system to protect samples
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for up to 10 years with more than 3
[260]
thousand moving parts
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nasa calls it the most intricate and
[264]
technologically advanced system
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sent to space
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there are 43 titanium tubes that hold a
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core sample about the size of a piece of
[275]
chalk
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the tubes are the cleanest thing that we
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have built
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at jpl it's ridiculously pristine
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there are clean rooms at jpl and
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clean rooms within clean rooms in a
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hyper clean room
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scientists blasted the tubes with air
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used deionized water on them
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and dipped them in baths of acetone and
[299]
other chemicals to be ultrasonically
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cleaned
[303]
then they were cooked all of those tubes
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went through 150 degree
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celsius bake out for 29 hours
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each tube can only be filled once so
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choosing samples is the job of an entire
[315]
team
[316]
and the tools they use are some of the
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costliest parts of perseverance
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tanya is on the team choosing those
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samples there's an instrument you can
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shoot laser beams at rocks and
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evaporate and make plasma and then
[330]
analyze that plasma to see what elements
[332]
are present in rocks which can tell us a
[334]
lot about the rock composition
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but before percy shoots space lasers it
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has to see
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where it's going and where to aim
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that's the most advanced of 23 on-board
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cameras
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and takes nearly every picture or video
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you will see from mars for the next few
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years
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like everything else on percy it's built
[382]
to withstand the extremes of mars
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sample collection will finish in 2023
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almost a decade later
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around 2031 the samples will be picked
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up from mars and brought back to earth
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nasa and the european space agency are
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paying for the next two missions the
[408]
european share is 1.8 billion dollars
[411]
while nasa's costs will likely be much
[414]
higher
[416]
first a fetch rover will be sent to the
[418]
martian surface
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its only job will be to go out grab the
[422]
tubes and bring them back
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the fetch rover will then transfer the
[427]
collected tubes into a rocket that lands
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with it
[430]
its purpose another first blasting off
[433]
from another planet
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rocket fuel is explosive and heavy so
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nasa is developing a way to make fuel
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on mars but mars atmosphere
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lacks oxygen a component of rocket fuel
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and that's where this gold square box
[449]
being lowered into percy comes in
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moxie or the mars oxygen in-situ
[455]
resource utilization experiment
[457]
converts the mars atmosphere into oxygen
[462]
if it works the second lander mission
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will carry a bigger moxie to create fuel
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[Music]
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so imagine that you have to build a
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rocket that will launch from earth
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travel seven months land on mars
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then when the samples are put into the
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nose cone
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point to a certain place in the sky and
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with 99.999 percent
[485]
reliability fire and then
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dock with a waiting spacecraft
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big tall order that waiting spacecraft
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will launch from earth at about the same
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time the fetch rover does
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once it arrives it'll grab the
[500]
basketball sized case containing samples
[503]
and then that spacecraft using electric
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propulsion is going to turn around
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and fly back to earth and once it gets
[513]
close
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it will drop off the earth entry vehicle
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and the earth entry vehicle is basically
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a heat shield
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with the samples inside and that earth
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entry vehicle
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will then land somewhere in utah
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nasa's independent review board
[532]
projected the total mars
[533]
sample return mission at nearly 9
[536]
billion
[538]
but that only gets us to a landing in
[540]
the desert not
[541]
studying the samples which will likely
[543]
push costs into the double-digit
[545]
billions
[546]
the apollo moon rocks came back to earth
[548]
more than 50 years ago
[550]
and remain important to science today
[554]
if this little amount of martian dirt
[555]
makes it back to earth we will have a
[557]
final cost
[558]
but in the end the value may be
[560]
priceless so really we are doing this
[563]
for the scientific community in the
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decades
[565]
perhaps even centuries to come
[577]
you
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